the new russian nationalismBacking the USSR
Paradoxical as it may seem, in absolute terms the ethnic non-
Russian respondents – more so than ethnic Russian respondents
- wanted to see Russia’s territory expand. Prompted by the intro-
ductory statement that state borders may shift in the course of
history and asked where they believed Russia’s borders should
be, 47.3 per cent of the ethnic Russian and 53 per cent of the
non- Russian respondents preferred expansion.^15 Even though
the additional t- test showed that this difference was not statisti-
cally significant, in absolute terms support for expansion trumped
support for the status quo. Another 36.7 per cent of the ethnic
non- Russians and 38.1 per cent of the ethnic Russians said they
felt Russia’s present borders should remain as they now are. A
minority of respondents opted for excluding the republics of the
North Caucasus from Russia while keeping other borders the
same – about 10 per cent of ethnic non- Russians and 14.5 per
cent ethnic Russians (Figure 6.3). That option, however, prob-
ably reflects a strong ethnic exclusionist preference consistent
with ethnic Russian nationalism, given that the question specifi-
cally mentioned only the Muslim republics of the North Caucasus
as areas to be excluded from Russia. In the context of media-
frenzied ethnic nationalist fervour, these respondents could plau-
sibly support Putin’s expansionist ethnic nationalism. However,
whether or not they do so is empirically indeterminate with the
existing data.
A concurrent nontrivial and counterintuitive finding is that
almost as many ethnic non- Russians as ethnic Russians −19.3 per
cent versus 21.8 per cent of respondents, respectively – backed
the idea of Russia expanding to the size of a ‘Slavic Union’ of
Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Figure 6.3). This distinction was
not statistically significant. However, ethnic identification mat-
tered significantly within the non- Russian sub- sample. Since a
large number of ethnic non- Russians were Slavs (Ukrainian and
Belorussian), an additional test checked if their views differed
systematically from those of the non- Slavs. They did. A Slavic
Union was favoured by only 12.2 per cent of the Tatars (N = 41)
and 11.1 per cent of the respondents who identified with an ethnic